Not so long ago I was posting about the torment of parenting a newly three-year-old child who had just struck the mother lode of stubborn defiance. I open with this fact to remind myself as much as you, because while there is no "perfect" when it comes to parenting, there are hard stretches and there are more tolerable stretches, where the hard doesn't take it out of you so bad and maybe there isn't as much of it, and we are into the good shit here, people.
I am in love with my kid.
If you do something nice for you, she rewards you with her version of Spanish: "Graspias," she says, with a perfectly enunciated P intruding right in the middle. If you thank her, she says, "De nawa." However, if you respond to "Graspias" with "de nawa," she will correct you. "It's de nada, Mama."
She is generous with her thank you's in any language, and polite in a very ladylike way for someone who has to be prevented from digging in her underpants whenever the mood strikes, which is every fifteen minutes or so. Should a single drop of tee-tee end up in her undies, they must be changed, no two ways about it; rather than look a gift horse in the mouth, I gather up all the floor underpants at the end of the day and give each pair an olfactory inspection. Most of them go right back in the drawer, since underpants get changed every time any clothes get changed, which is, oh, seven or eight times a day. She usually puts the rest of the clothes back in the drawer -- so again, gift horse, not to be examined too closely about the mouth.
Sophia has memorized -- in entirety -- The Sneetches and The Cat in the Hat, and several other bedtime favorites, and "reads" them to her dolls, Truck, Stench, and Raggedy Ann (guess which ones she named). There are conflicts, sometimes, between Truck and Raggedy Ann; there was hitting. But I heard her performing gentle and appropriate acts of discipline -- "You hit Truck," she told Raggedy Ann. "Now he is crying. How can you help him feel better?" I love just to listen to her.
Every day, in lieu of the nap she gave up a year ago (), she has Quiet Resting Time after lunch -- we set the alarm, and she hangs out in her room for an hour, hour and a half. An introvert, she clearly draws her energy from being left alone sometimes, and emerges refreshed even though she doesn't sleep. I hear her in there, reading stories, singing songs to her dolls, playing with who knows what. After a bumpy first two weeks, she really got into it, and now if she feels cranky in the afternoon (say, if we drag her all over the city in the early afternoon) she tells me, "I need my Quiet Resting Time" Man, I love that.
She's got a -- not bossy, exactly, but something like it, streak -- that leads her to direct other kids at preschool. Clearly she's modeling the grown-ups, and sometimes it actually works -- reports from the field indicate she turned back a gang of rowdy kids ready for drum class, when the room wasn't clean yet. Sometimes I have to remind her that grown-ups need to handle certain things (i.e. You are not responsible for corralling the kid who disappears down the hallway -- let the teachers do it), but sometimes she amazes me. Yesterday Polly and Jack were over, and there was some dispute over who got to use a favored truck; Jack was crying when Polly wouldn't hand it over. Sophia patted his back, then found him a different truck. This is not to say she's Gandhi or anything; she relies heavily on a friend (Polly) who is a developmental stage ahead of her, and compassionate enough to give in on certain matters, and one (Jack) who is a little younger, and to whom she can yield without feeling like she's lost face. (Also, he's pretty chill about things anyway.)
So there she is, three years old, her little self marching down the sidewalk and holding doors open for neighbors. She comes out of the tub every night damp and cold like a little salamander, smiling and shivering and ready to be jammied and read to, demanding to be carried the ten feet to her room. And I do it, because she won't want it forever. For now, she wants to have one hand on me while she falls asleep; for now she wants to sit on my lap while we watch a show. No matter how much I thought I understood it, I couldn't have known the brevity of her babyhood, how fast we'd get to here. And once in a while I can stop myself and pay attention, now, because everything I adore now is changing already, and that piping little voice will change, and those baby lips will change, and maybe she won't come to me for a Band-Aid, preferring to nurse her own hurts in private.
But for now I have my little salamander, my deranged sea monster who RRRAAAARRs and springs naked from the sofa cushions. "Nakin' around Nake nake nake Nakin' around" she shrieks, and I laugh, and let her be wild in the safety of the sofa cushions heaped on the floor.
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